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Cross-Cultural Studies is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken. Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas, Cross-Cultural Studies illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present. Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature, the arts, and public policy.Among the major issues treated at length in Cross-Cultural Studies are: The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization; The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles; The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region; The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America, Europe, and Africa; The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern; The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare; The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbors.Contributions to Cross-Cultural Studies give a concrete cultural and historical analysis of such contemporary critical terms as hybridity, transculturation, and the carnivalesque, which have so often been taken out of context and employed in narrowly ideological contexts.Two important theories of the simultaneous unity and diversity of Caribbean literature and culture, propounded by Antonio A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC Data -- General preface -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region -- Preliminary Approaches -- Mapping the Caribbean: Cartography and the Cannibalization of Culture -- Islands, Enclaves, Continua: Notes Toward a Comparative History of Caribbean Creole Literatures -- The Cross-Cultural Unity of Caribbean Literature: Toward a Centripetal Vision -- Literary Creoleness and Chaos Theory -- Chaos and Rhizome: Introduction to a Caribbean Poetics -- Resistance and Globalization in Caribbean Discourse: Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Édouard Glissant -- Problematics of Literary Historiography -- A Comparative Analysis of Caribbean Literary Magazines: 1960 -1980 -- History is Bunk! Recovering the Meaning of Independence in Venezuela, Colombia and Curaçao -- Literature and Popular Culture -- Oral Tradition and New Literary Canon in Caribbean Poetry -- When the Popular Sings the Self: Heterology, Popular Songs and Caribbean Writing -- Carnival and Carnivalization -- Caribbean Culture: A Carnivalesque Approach -- Writers Playin' Mas': Carnival and The Grotesque in the Contemporary Caribbean Novel -- Gender and Identity -- New World Seductions and Old World Seducers: When Columbu Met Don Juan -- Closure and Disclosure of the Caribbean Body: Gabriel García Márquez and Derek Walcott -- Anglophone and Francophone Fiction by Caribbean Women: Redefining ''Female Identity '' -- The Caliban Complex -- The Cult of Caliban: Collaboration and Revisionism in Contemporary Caribbean Narrative -- (Post)Modernity and Caribbean Discourse -- Genre and Postcoloniality -- From Prince to Lorde: The Politics of Location in Caribbean Autobiography -- Caribbean Sublime: on Transport -- Cross-Cultural Currents and Conundrums.
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